Call for Papers (deadline June 1, 2015):Experiencing the Global Environment
Workshop, February 4-6, 2016
Department II, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

The global environment is an idea that permeates the loosely connected
cluster of disciplines referred to as the environmental or earth sciences. From
the second half of the 19th century onwards, geology, meteorology,
climatology, oceanography, ecology, and seismography, among others, have shared
a common commitment to obtaining images and representations of the earth at the
supra-anthropic scale. It is the scale of global circulation models, systems
ecology, the biosphere, Spaceship Earth, and “big data.” This workshop seeks to
write the human scale back into the history of the global environment by
looking at individual and collective ways of experiencing nature in the work of
practitioners in the environmental sciences.
There are at least two fundamental ways in which experiences of nature
coevolved with the global environment. First, practices of data gathering
confronted practitioners with perceptions of their local environment mediated
by new technologies. This opened the way to new phenomena, from previously
unheard sounds to newly discovered entities, such as radioactive minerals.
Second, notions of an interconnected, global environment provided new
conceptual frameworks with which to interpret and give order to particular
experiences, from climatic variations to earth’s tremors.
In this workshop, we would like to turn our attention to the ways in which
individual and collective experiences of nature have been transformed within
the environmental sciences. The “body of the artisan“ has at times been assumed
to fade before the immensity of planetary sciences. Acknowledging the presence
of experience in the production of sciences of the global promises new ways of
exploring this blossoming field. While the question of how local practices gave
way to global knowledge has been central to the history of science and related
fields in recent decades, we endeavor to focus on the coexistence and
coproduction of local perception and sensory experience with global universal
models and frameworks.
We hope to address a variety of questions in the workshop: how did new
technologies and ways of perceiving cooperate in making new experiences of the
environment possible? How did the construction of a global, interconnected
environment change the perception and evaluation of locally gathered data? What
kind of evidence did scientists use to construct images of a global environment
and what kind of information did they potentially disregard in the process? How
did professional and amateur practitioners describe and contextualize their own
experiences of conducting research in an era of quantified data? How do
technologies shape experience in ways that go beyond individual subjectivity?
And what role did individual sensory experience play in the construction of
large-scale models in the earth and environmental sciences?
Please send your proposals of up to 350 words to the organizers of the
workshop by June 1, 2015.
Lino Camprubí (lcamprubi@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)
Philipp Lehmann (plehmann@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)

The birth and diffusion of nuclear science
and technology are probably among the most far-reaching and significant
changes in the organizational forms, social and economic role, structure,
and contents of science and technology during the 20th century. The
complexity and demands of the nuclear energy option in terms of
technology, industry, economics and politics constitute strong enough
reasons to examine it from a wide variety of perspectives. The aim of
interdisciplinary historical reflection on the development of the atomic
programs which is proposed in this Conference is to make a paradigmatic
contribution to the generation of a framework of analysis for the
assessment of new policies of technological development in general, and
of that of energy in particular.

From this point of view, it is important
to think over the nature of the nuclear development programs between the
1950s and the 1980s in order to determine their internal dynamics, to
establish their defining characteristics and to be able to bring the
results to the present-day discussion. The aim of the Conference is to
provide a comparative historical and systematic study of the development
and impact of nuclear programs in those European countries which hoped
to reach higher levels of industrial and economic development by
fostering nuclear power during the post-war period. This Conference will
help to show the historical character of processes of technological
development, as well as the need to deploy co-ordinated economic theories
and models in order to understand historical processes of
techno-scientific and industrial development in contemporary societies.
Because of the characteristics of nuclear energy, the results of this
Conference will be of great interest to politicians, the administrators
of scientific and industrial policies, sociologists of science and
technology, historians of technology and science and of economics, and
general historians of 20th-century Europe.

This unique course will trace the historical
development of evidence-based health care. Students will engage with
researchers who have played key roles in defining the History, Philosophy and
actual practice of Evidence-Based Healthcare. Many famous medical doctors,
including Galen, Descartes and Locke, were also philosophers, and recent
evidence suggests that studying humanities improves clinical skills. Medical
professionals will learn to think critically about the assumptions of their
profession while philosophers and historians will learn about the empirical
foundations of the science they contemplate.

Many past students have published their assignments for
the course in peer-reviewed journals.

Why study the
history and philosophy of Evidence-Based Heath Care (EBHC)?